January 2013 - Represent Consumers

For bailed-out executives, the gravy train never ends

How many bailed-out executives does it take to screw the American taxpayer?

Not many, when they have the kind of phony oversight the Treasury Department has been providing for the companies we bailed The latest report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) - known to the rest of us as the Wall Street bailout – portrays the Treasury Department’s bailout overseers as more concerned with coddling corporate titans than they were with protecting taxpayers – even though excessive compensation was a main cause of bankers’ reckless risk-taking in the first place by rewarding short-term performance rather than more sustainable long-term gains.

The damning IG report, issued January 28, outlines a pattern of the Treasury Department’s acting pay czar, Patricia Geoghegan, approving excessive compensation for the corporate executives who took public funds while ignoring previous recommendations from the special IG’s office to implement polices to restrain their pay.

Treasury’s continuing approval of the excessive salaries contradicts President Obama’s vow to rein in bank pay in the wake of bankers’ outrageous bonuses after the bailout. “It does offend our values when executives of big financial firms that are struggling pay themselves huge bonuses even as they rely on extraordinary assistance to stay afloat,” the president said in 2009.

Geoghegan, a retired lawyer for the white-shoe Wall Street corporate law firm Cravath, Swain & Moore, justified her approvals for three companies, AIG, GM and Ally Financial Inc., citing the companies’ concerns [for losing the executives while they worked to get their firms out of debt to the TARP program as quickly as possible. rephrase] AIG has since paid back its TARP money; GM and Ally remain in the program.

Geoghegan approved huge pay hikes for executives overseeing units of the companies that were not doing well – and even going bankrupt.

While her predecessor set guidelines that barred cash salaries at the bailed-out firms exceeding $500,000 except for good cause, the IG found that Treasury in 2012 approved salaries of $3 million or more for 54 percent of the top 69 bailed-out bank executives, while another 23 percent got salaries of $5 million or more.

In her report, the special inspector general, Christy Romero concluded: “While taxpayers struggle to overcome the recent financial crisis and look to the U.S. Government to put a lid on compensation for executives of firms whose missteps nearly crippled the U.S. financial system, the U.S. Department of the Treasury continues to allow excessive executive pay.”

Rather than develop her own analysis of the company’s request for compensation, Geoghegan merely parroted what the company said to her. According to the report, “[Geoghegan’s decisions] were largely driven by the companies’ pay proposals, the same companies that historically, and again in 2012, proposed excessive pay, failing to appreciate the extraordinary situation they were in, with taxpayers funding and partially owning them.”

If the pay czar won’t question the firms’ salaries request, “who else will protect the taxpayers?” Romero asked.

Obviously not the Treasury Department, which was given a chance to address the Inspector General’s criticisms. In its written response, the Treasury Department disagreed with the IG’s findings and conclusions and did not agree to implement any of its recommendations.

The Treasury Department shouldn’t be allowed to thumb its nose at taxpayers in such a flagrant manner, or at the president’s clearly stated wishes. Or does Treasury’s cave-in to the bankers indicate that President Obama changed his mind?

We should demand that Congress conduct a thorough and public investigation into who thwarted the president’s efforts to scale back pay at bailed-out firms.

A great place to start would be contacting the members of the Senate Banking Committee to demand they look into it.

For lobbyists and their bosses, budget crisis is big winner

Turns out not everybody was distressed that Congress has been tied up in knots for months obsessed with the self-imposed fiscal cliff crisis.

The lobbying industry, which had previously been in the dumps because of the do-nothing Congress, came roaring back to life in 2012, due in large part to the prolonged budget crisis.

According to the Center For Public Integrity, about half of the country’s top 100 lobbying firms spend more in the fourth quarter last year than they did in the third quarter, and about half showed an overall increase for 2012 over the previous year.

The top spender was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which laid out a whopping $125 million in 2012, an 88 percent increase over the previous year. That doesn’t include the $36 million they paid to influence the outcome of the election. Another big spender was J.P. Morgan, which served up $8.8 million in lobbying and another $784,923 to influence the election.

This increased lobbying activity unfortunately goes on outside public view. Only later can we tally up the damage from this legalized corruption of our democracy – and our pocketbooks.

And when lobbyists win, so do the corporations that pay them big bucks.

I wrote earlier this month about the corporate goodies hidden away in the fiscal cliff deal that represented just a part of the lobbyists’ handiwork – a down payment from members of Congress on their debt to the corporations who foot the bill for their campaigns and other political adventures.

Because there was no grand bargain, Congress couldn’t go all the way on their corporate overlords’ agenda, such as implementing the Social Security and Medicare cuts the CEOs have been hammering away at.

One of the most recent glaring examples of how our government does corporate bidding in secret, contrary to the public good, is the recent favor Congress did for biotech and pharmaceutical giant Amgen, hidden in the fiscal cliff deal.

As revealed by investigative reporters for the New York Times, Amgen received a very profitable gift in that deal – an exemption from Medicare price controls for one its kidney dialysis drugs. It’s the second such exemption Amgen obtained for the drug, Sensipar, which accounted for $950 million in sales last year, an 18 percent increase over the previous year.

So the $7.6 million the company paid for lobbying, and another $1.7 million in political contributions the company showered on both parties, was a small price to pay the government to keep its mitts off the company’s hot property.

At the center of the fiscal cliff deal were two senators, one Democrat, Max Baucus, and one Republican, Mitch McConnell, who are prime recipients of Amgen’s generosity. Since 2007, Amgen has given Baucus $67,500 and McConnell $73,000.

Amgen has also donated $141,000 to President Obama, who signed off on the fiscal cliff deal.

Congress’ secret favor for Amgem is expected to cost Medicare $500 million.

In December, before the fiscal cliff deal was set, President Obama was stressing the importance of reducing Medicare costs.

“I’m willing to reduce our government’s Medicare bills by finding new ways to reduce the cost of healthcare in this country," Obama said. "That's something that we all should agree on. We want to make sure that Medicare is there for future generations. But the current trajectory of health care costs is going up so high we've got to find ways to make sure that it’s sustainable."

The Amgen exemption also highlights the revolving door nature of business in Washington; current lobbyists for Amgen include former chiefs of staff for Baucus and McConnell.

A Vermont congressman has introduced legislation to undo Amgen’s sweet deal. Rep. Peter Welch, a Democrat, told the Los Angeles Times: “Amgen managed to get a $500-million paragraph in the fiscal-cliff bill and virtually no one in Congress was aware of it. It’s a taxpayer ripoff and comes at a really bad time when we’re trying to control healthcare costs. Amgen should not be allowed to turn Medicare into a profit center.”

Call your representative and senator and let them know how you feel about major corporations like Amgen getting secret favors behind closed doors.

Action / Bipartisanship / Fiscal cliff / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 01/28/2013

Four ways to tell if President Obama was lip-syncing

So it turns out that Beyonce’s ardent, flawless performance of the Star-Spangled Banner may have been lip-synced. The more important and far trickier question is whether President Obama’s impassioned promise to fight for the middle class and a just society is for real, or just more lip service.

The president pushed all the right buttons to our inspire our belief, crafting a theme of “We the people,” defending the importance of collective efforts and evoking battlefields in the people’s fight for justice, from March on Selma to Seneca Falls to the Stonewall bar. And he took the oath of office with his hand on Martin Luther KIng’s traveling bible, the one the civil rights leader carried with him and scribbled notes in as he led the movement.

Many people have invested their hopes and dreams in the president’s leadership and are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the tepid economic recovery and unkept promises. I thought it was a terrific speech but I’m less giddy about the speech and our prospects for the next four years.

One source of my skepticism is the president’s choice to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, under whose leadership, blessed by the president, the too big to fail banks got bigger, no bankers were held accountable for the financial collapse, and the government’s efforts to clean up the foreclosure mess floundered. Geithner, meanwhile, ridiculed efforts by others on the Obama economic team who wanted to fight for a bigger stimulus that would have helped others who weren’t bankers.

To replace Geithner, the president chose his chief of staff Jacob Lew, who enjoyed a brief, highly paid stint at too big to fail Citigroup from 2006 to 2009, as a manager in a unit that bet against the housing market in the run-up to the financial collapse. After Citigroup reaped its share of the taxpayer-funded bailout, the bank awarded Lew a $950,000 bonus. Before his service to Citigroup, he served as head of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, which gave bank deregulation its final push into reality. Of his Citigroup gig, Robert Kuttner wrote, “It was mainly a chance for a skilled public manager to make himself some money until the Democrats returned to power.”

Especially troubling is the lack of expertise Lew demonstrated in comments during a 2010 Senate hearing, where he candidly acknowledged he was not particularly sophisticated in his financial understanding – but went on to downplay the role of deregulation in the financial meltdown.

“My sense, as someone who has generally been familiar with these trends is that the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation; there was an increasing emphasis on highly abstract leveraged derivative products that got us to the point that in the period of time leading up to the financial crisis risks were taken, they weren’t fully embraced, they weren’t well understood,” Lew said. “I don’t personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause. I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.”

But the even the grandaddy of financial deregulation himself, Alan Greenspan, has acknowledged what a fiasco it was. As the Consumer Education Foundation pointed out in its March 2009 report, co-authored with Essential Information, “financial deregulation led directly to the financial collapse” by allowing banks to concoct and sell complex investments based on worthless mortgages – without any government oversight or interference.

Regardless of his expertise or lack of it in high finance, Lew is a member in good standing of the elite financial industry – government corridors of power that have been peddling austerity – a particularly hostile landscape for the hopes and dreams of the middle class. Is this really the person Obama believes is best to lead the economic team that is supposed to protect the middle class? If Obama is serious about following through about his inaugural speech promises to protect and preserve economically vulnerable Americans, he’s going to need a much more ambitious and specific agenda than he’s offered so far, and he’s going to need to abandon some major policies he’s been pursuing. And he’s going to need a cabinet and a political team to flesh those policies out, sell them to the country and skillfully push them through Congress. Lew will have to reach way beyond his comfort zone, in which he has functioned as a quintessential insider and number-cruncher.

A great inaugural speech is not about to convince the vast corporate interests that have poisoned our politics to pack up and go home.

To truly protect the middle class, the president is going to have get outside the austerity bubble that Washington has built up around itself with the help of the media wise men and women who judge political courage and wisdom by how much our leaders are willing to slash from social programs.

The way to protect the middle class is straightforward – but demands a departure from the conventional thinking that rules Washington.

Economist Robert Pollin suggests two very specific – and grand – goals for Obama to shoot for. First, cut unemployment in half by the end of 2016, back to 3.9 percent, where it was in 2000, creating an additional 13 million jobs, through a combination of federal stimulus funding,and grabbing the excess funds that the Federal Reserve has shoveled to banks. While bankers have profited from the Fed’s generosity, they have not used those funds to spur the broader economy. Here’s an interview in which Pollin details his views.

The second is creating a real program to fight and reverse rising poverty in the U.S., reducing the number of people living in poverty from 15 to 11 million, again aiming to reduce the poverty to 2000 levels. Again, Pollin says the best way to do this is by focusing on resources on job creation.

Inside Washington’s austerity bubble, this idea of dramatically reducing unemployment or poverty is never discussed any more, amid assumptions that either people are poor because of their own failings or the government can’t afford to do anything about it.

But outside the bubble, economists like Pollin and others suggest another path, and if Obama is serious about the ideals he articulated in his speech, he’ll lead the fight to burst the austerity bubble, embracing this more activist path.

If he’s really intent on helping average Americans, there are two policies President Obama is pursuing that he should immediately discard, because they will hurt the middle class.

The first is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the latest in a long line of so-called free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, that have been sold to the public as boosts to the economy but have really crushed low and middle income jobs by increasing outsourcing and lowering wages. While the TPP talks exclude the public, corporate lobbyists have free access.

The president and his team should acknowledge the dangers to America of these phony free trade deals, and abandon the TPP and others like them.

The president should also drop the idea of “tweaking” Social Security by adopting “chained CPI,” which is a way of calculating the “cost of living” that would reduce future Social Security payments. The president has suggested that “chained CPI” could be part of fiscal grand bargain to reduce the deficit. While the president has touted the plan as a kind of a technical fix that would strengthen the program in the long run, Social Security watchdogs say chained CPI would result in substantial benefit reductions.

You’ll know the president is serious about keeping his promise to protect the middle class when you see him following through on this short list.

Citibank / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Social Security - 01/27/2013

Americans Unchained: Guns, Government and Justice

I’m starting to understand why there are 311 million Americans and 310 million guns in America. It’s not just about hunting or collecting.

It’s about self-defense – not against street crime, which has dropped like a rock over the last two decades, but against a world that seems to have run amok, and against which the government frequently seems inept or powerless.

I’m not just talking about 9/11 – though I’m willing to bet that gun sales spiked after our country, with all its military might and a $300 billion defense budget, proved defenseless against nineteen extremists with box cutters. Consider how Washington and Wall Street connived to betray America under the guise of “deregulation,” leaving our homes, jobs, and life savings at the mercy of greed-driven speculation. It will take years for most Americans to recover what they lost since 2008 – many never will. The U.S. government proved quite adept at arranging the immediate rescue of the Money Industry; but huge numbers of our citizenry are stuck in the equivalent of the New Orleans Superdome after Hurricane Katrina – left to fend for themselves.

Name a major disaster and then connect the dots, as I have attempted previously: the Enron/California Energy Crisis Hoax, 9/11, Katrina, the mass shootings by deranged loners who somehow “fall through the cracks” till they slaughter our loved ones. Then add the nation’s gravely inadequate response to global warming – the most dangerous and disruptive threat to our security on the horizon. A fearful pattern of incompetence emerges.

And so, if our government cannot protect us, we will protect ourselves – or at least try to, as if putting weapons in cockpits or classrooms is going to work.

A dramatic decline in public confidence in the government is clearly underway. 81% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to the Gallup polling organization. That’s actually an improvement over its all-time worst score of 90% last August, but hardly anything the Founders would be proud of. President Obama is also doing better, but his disapproval rating has soared from 15% in January 2009 to 43% a few days ago.

These numbers change when Americans are asked to assess the presidency and Congress as institutions in the abstract. The former scored a 43% disapproval rating – nearly identical to the current occupant’s. But only 65% of Americans disapproved of the legislative branch – fifteen points lower than the disapproval rate for the current Congress.

Rating the federal government as a whole, 63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied.

That the executive and legislative branches are held in low esteem is not news, and being the so-called “political” branches, not particularly surprising.

More important is the ranking of the branch of government whose single job is to maintain the basic software of the U.S. operating system – our laws. These are the principles, originating in the Constitution, by which democracy and its citizens are supposed to abide. They are administered by the judicial branch, the one branch of government structured to be impervious to political pressure, including the influence of money.

Trust in the legal system is higher than either the executive or legislative branches, Gallup researchers report, but a solid third of all Americans disapprove of the judicial branch. The good news is that Americans’ view of the courts hasn’t changed much since 1973.

By some objective measures, however, America’s once vaunted system of laws fares poorly with respect to other socio-economically similar nations. The World Justice Project’s annual “Rule of Law Index” places the U.S. nineteenth out of twenty-nine countries, principally because of wealth-based disparities in Americans’ access to the legal system.

The judicial branch faces four serious challenges that, unless abated, are going to further undermine public confidence – not just in the judiciary, but also in government and democracy.

First is the increasingly politicized conduct of the courts themselves.

In 2000, the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court stopped the vote count process in Florida and awarded the election to George Bush. In 2011, the Republican majority on the high court ruled that those “arbitration clauses” inserted in the fine print of virtually every contract between a giant corporation and consumers must be enforced to deny people their right to sue a company in court. And then of course there is the infamous Citizens United case, in which the Republican majority ruled that injecting money into elections to influence the outcome is a form of free speech, and that corporations exercising that right are protected by the First Amendment. In that single decision, the Court disenfranchised the vast majority of Americans who cannot hire their own lobbyist or fund the election of a friendly politician.

Finally, most Americans are aware that Chief Justice Roberts broke with his Republican colleagues to uphold federal health care reform last year. What they’re not aware of is this: buried in the legalese of that decision, Justice Roberts opened the door to a change in constitutional jurisprudence that would roll back American law to the standards in effect in 1905, when the Supreme Court struck down congressional workplace and other reforms. Consistently favoring corporations over people is not just bad law, it’s bad for the credibility of the court.

And it’s not just the Supreme Court. The overtly political and severely partisan appointments process for federal judges leads to decisions based on ideology rather than law, as the New York Times, surveying several recent books, reports.

Second, special interests are increasingly trying to corrupt judicial elections, a phenomenon that I’ve noted grew to serious proportions last year as a result of the Citizens United decision. Business groups seeking favorable treatment are challenging the judges who have ruled against them, or might do so in the future. John Grisham’s novel “The Appeal” is thinly veiled fact; the searing documentary “Hot Coffee” exposes the true story of how several state supreme court justices were ousted by business lobbyists. Far from being embarrassed by the assault on judicial impartiality, no less an institution than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is leading the charge along with other business funded groups. The taxpayer-subsidized organizations’ two-step system is to first target state court systems based on whether they are pro-business or pro-consumer. A Chamber collaborator is slightly less nuanced: it calls these courts “judicial hellholes,” a term it has copyrighted. Then the groups help organize the political campaigns against the judges, replacing them with candidates who will rule in favor of big-business. An estimated $30 million was spent on TV ads alone in 2012 judicial elections. Once judges get sucked into the machinery of electoral campaigns, Americans will doubt their impartiality.

Third, the courts have approved crummy settlements in numerous lawsuits – often brought by government agencies – citing banks for unlawful foreclosure practices, illegal manipulation of interests rates, and a host of other multi-billion dollar heists and scams of breathtaking audacity connected to the financial debacle. My colleague Marty Berg has documented just a few of the many examples of settlements that leave the victims with next to nothing, while the banks and their fat cat execs get off with a slap on the wrist... or even a kiss on the lips. It’s not the courts’ fault that federal prosecutors can’t seem to throw a net around the high-level white-collar crooks that ran our economy into a ditch and destroyed so many people’s lives. But the courts do have the responsibility to reject the vacuous deals that benefit only the perps and their political friends. With the few notable exceptions of federal judges insisting on tougher terms, the vast majority of these sweetheart settlements are rubber-stamped.

Fourth, the court systems in many states have sustained heavy collateral damage from the Wall Street Financial Debacle of 2008. In California, budget deficits have led to massive cuts in funding for the courts; some courtrooms have closed; judges have retired; and parties now have to pay for their own court reporters to record the proceedings. It is not mere inconvenience that concerns lawyers here. “Justice is now being rationed in our state,” Patrick Kelly, the President of the California State Bar said. He told the Los Angeles Daily Journal: “The public….[is] used to a court system that handles all these issues, child support obligations, contract disputes. What is going to happen when the court system can no longer take care of that? … There is a potential [for] serious degeneration of civil responsibility in California.”

By applying the rule of law, courts play a critical role in preserving American ideals of fairness, competition and impartial justice. John Adams, who helped Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence and later became the second president of the United States, said this of the Seventh Amendment: “without the right to trial by jury we have no way to keep us from being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, fed like swine and clothed like hounds.”

The presence of a million more guns than people in this country is an alarming plebiscite on the nation’s confidence in the rule of law. If Americans lose faith in the courts as they have with other democratic institutions, disputes that would otherwise be settled by law will be settled by force. Take a look at the chaos and devastation now underway in countries where the only law that governs is the law of the jungle.

Citizens United / Congress / Harvey Column / Supreme Court - 01/23/2013

Three signs that the fiscal cliff deal is malarkey

Remember the beleaguered middle class? Our political leaders don’t seem to.

Reeling from the fiscal cliff fiasco and hurtling toward the debt ceiling debacle, Washington has forgotten all of its election-year promises to focus on the best way to create jobs and enhance economic security for the 99 percent.

One of the most amazing aspects of the whole fiscal cliff/debt ceiling fiasco is the continuing ability of the political and media class to manufacture phony economic crises while ignoring the concerns that affect the majority of Americans every day.

High unemployment and rising health and elder care costs? Gnawing uncertainty about the future? Declining wages and disappearing pensions? Income inequality?

We haven’t heard much about them since Election Day.

Meanwhile our media elite cover every micro-twitch of the Washington insiders as they pose and posture their way through the debate, while smothering in ridicule anybody who dares question the prevailing deficit hysteria.

One piece of wisdom did surface briefly masquerading as a whacko proposal – having the government create a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Though this scheme was nixed by the Treasury, it did have the virtue of pointing up an important fact usually ignored in mainstream bloviating about the deficit – the government is not a family. The U.S. government can create money and does, except recently it’s been printing money only to hand it over to big banks with no strings attached, rather than using it to pay down the deficit, create jobs or fix bridges.

And how about that dramatic last-minute deal that averted the fiscal cliff? To paraphrase Vice-President Joe Biden (when he was dismissing Paul Ryan’s dismal budget plan), the whole thing is a load of malarkey.

Except this time Biden and his boss, President Obama weren’t blasting it, they were touting it as a great achievement.

If you’re not familiar with the term, Miriam-Webster defines malarkey as “insincere or foolish talk.”

The first tipoff that the deal constitutes malarkey is the whole dispute over whether it actually reduces the deficit at all.

The Congressional Budget Office contends the deal will increase the deficit nearly $4 trillion over 10 years, while the president, using a different starting for his calculation, argues that it will raise $620 billion over that time period. If you’re confused, you should be. The difference is not trivial, and makes the whole process stink. As the New York said, “How do you agree on what needs to be done going forward if you can’t agree where you are?”

When it comes to deficits, I’m from the Dick Cheney school. The former vice-president, in a rare moment of candor, said: “Deficits don’t matter.”

Except when politicians want to beat their opponents over the heads with them. Most recently, the deficit soared not primarily because of out of control government spending, but because the economy went in the toilet, and the government came to the rescue of our fellow citizens with jobless benefits, food stamps and stimulus spending.

Of course, Cheney was also trying to help out his boss, President George W. Bush, who wanted to give rich people a mammoth tax break and put two wars on the government’s tab, thereby running up the deficit.

What he meant was that Republicans don’t care about deficits when the money goes to support spending they like – like military contracts. What they oppose is spending money on social programs that they would just as soon dismantle.

The second sign that the recent fiscal cliff deal is malarkey is what the politicians did to the payroll tax cut, which was enacted in 2010 and put more than $1,000 a year back into the bank accounts of average Americans.

In spite of all President Obama’s promises not to increase the economic burdens already weighing down the middle class, our leaders allowed this relatively small but significant tax cut to expire. As a result, 125 million Americans who couldn’t afford to hire lobbyists saw their paychecks decrease in January. Since the payroll tax helps pay for Social Security, some applauded the demise of the payroll tax cut.

But the end of the payroll tax cut is just the latest example of our leaders solving budget problems on the backs of those who can afford it least.

In addition, the president had insisted, going in to the fiscal cliff negotiations, that he would get $50 billion in new stimulus money in the deal. But those funds never materialized.

The third red flag buried in the fiscal cliff deal is an item that neither of the parties mentioned in their press conferences announcing it. But it’s the surest way to tell that the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling, which are supposed to be about this massive crisis, are just the latest chapter in Washington business as usual: major corporations using the cover of a manufactured crisis to get their hands on more goodies.

As reported by Matt Stoller, the deal contains eight separate giveaways to individual businesses or industries, including Goldman-Sachs, Hollywood movie studios, NASCAR, coal mine operators and asparagus growers.

Of particular interest was the extension of the tax exempt financing of something called Liberty Zone in New York, funds which were supposed to be designated to help business in the city recover from 9/11. But rather than going to small businesses, big corporations like Goldman-Sachs got the breaks. Goldman-Sachs has gotten $1.6 billion in tax-empt bonds to help defray the costs of building? its new $2.1 billion headquarters.

So while the politicians have been posturing in public vowing to protect the middle-crisis and wringing their hands over the dire state of the government’s finances, they’ve been working overtime in private doling out expensive favors to their corporate donors.

The biggest threat to our future is not the deficit, not by a long shot. The far greater danger remains the largely unchecked and hidden power of corporations to control our government.

Congress / Fiscal clitt / Goldman-Sachs / Income inequality / Martin Column / Mitt Romney / President Barack Obama - 01/17/2013